DEL.ICIO.USUGA gets $4.1 million to study honeybee deaths
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Washington — The U.S. Department of Agriculture has awarded $4.1 million to the University of Georgia to lead a nationwide investigation into the mysterious deaths of honeybees, a threat to pollination valued at $15 billion a year to American farming.
“Georgia is one of the lead players” in the honeybee world, said Keith Delaplane, the UGA entomology professor who will direct the four-year investigation that will involve 17 colleges and universities.
April Sorrow/University of Georgia
University of Georgia entomology professor Keith Delaplane will direct the four-year, nationwide investigation of why bees are dying.
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“We estimate that honeybees contribute $75 million a year to the state economy,” Delaplane said in a telephone interview. That includes pollination of crops such as fruits and vegetables, honey revenues, and actual sales of bees. Georgia is the leading producer of queen bees and packaged bees east of the Mississippi River, he said.
Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer announced the grant to study the causes of colony collapse disorder and other diseases affecting bee populations.
“Bees are an extremely valuable contributor to the overall productivity of American agriculture, but invasive pests, diseases and environmental stresses are putting U.S. bees at serious risk,” Schafer said. “This research will help beekeepers meet the pollination demand for the nation’s food supply.”
The University of Georgia is the lead institution for the project, and Delaplane is the director. The professor is the author of several books on honeybees and beekeeping.
“This is a special category of grants (to deal with) problems of national impact. They award only one a year,” Delaplane said Thursday.
Delaplane said the decline of the honeybee population has been tracked since 1945. However, there has been a “sharp downward spike” in the past few years.
He said the new research will focus on a relatively short list of possible causes. Among these are a handful of bee viruses; a single-cell organism that “gets in the gut” of bees and causes death; the varroa mite, which came from Asia in 1987, and new categories of pesticides such as flea killers for pets, Delaplane said.
The goal of the nationwide research is to eliminate redundancy in a “coordinated attempt to figure out what is causing honeybee decline and what we can do about it,” he said.
So, the universities of Maine and Massachusetts will be dealing more broadly with pollinators beyond honeybees, the University of Georgia will focus on the varroa mite, the University of Nebraska will look at pesticides, and other universities will deal with other aspects of the problem.
There will be an emphasis of genetic solutions – breeding honeybees that are naturally resistant to the causes of death, Delaplane said. “It doesn’t make sense to come up with another chemical to fix the problem,” he said, since chemicals are likely involved in the causes.
“This type of grant is very outcome-oriented,” said Delaplane. “Four years from now, we’re going to know pretty clearly … what are the problems here.”
“Knowing your enemy is the first step to winning,” he said. “It will be a major accomplishment if we can do that.”
The USDA said colony collapse disorder became a major concern in the winter of 2006-2007, when an estimated 25 percent of the nation’s beekeepers reported major losses of adult bees from their hives.
The department said the main symptom of colony collapse disorder is a hive with no or few adult honeybees present, but with a live queen bee. Often there is still honey in the hive, and immature bees are present.
In the typical American diet, about one out of every three mouthfuls of food directly or indirectly results from honeybee pollination, the USDA said. The cost of hives for pollination is rising, not only because of dying bees, but also because of rising gas prices to get the bees to the fields where they are needed. This contributes to the rising cost of food.
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